The Handmaid's Tale By Margaret Atwood

1. Novel: The Handmaid’s Tale, Author: Margaret Atwood, Date of Publication: 1985,Genre: dystopian novel, speculative fiction.

2. Written and published in the 1980s, the United States was having many issues beforehand in the late 1960s and in the early 1970s; issues such as the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam War, the Middle Eastern crisis was causing havoc in the country. In response, conservatives flourished during the 1980s and elected president Ronald Reagan to represent their ideas on social, political, and economic policies. Liberal movements, such as the feminist movement, all received backlash from the conservative movement with their religious beliefs. Conservatives wanted to end abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment, something

Margaret Atwood was born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario. She has had a love for literature ever since she was a little girl. She started to write plays and poems at six years old. She graduated high school in 1957 and began studying at Victoria College in the University of Toronto. There she published many poems and articles in the college literary journal. In 1961, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English and a minor in philosophy and French. After she graduated, she went to Harvard University and studied in Radcliffe College. In 1962, she received a master’s degree and continued to study there for her doctorate degree but did not finish. She went on to teach in a variety of universities including: The University of British Columbia in 1965, the University of Alabama in 1985 and New York University, where she was Berg Professor of English. In 1968, Atwood married Jim Polk and later divorced in 1973. She then fell in love with novelist Graeme Gibson and had a daughter named Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson in 1976 in a farm near Alliston, Ontario. She has gone on to have written books on the topics and genres of feminism, where female characters are suppressed by a dominating patriarchy, speculative fiction, and social science fiction. In 2004, she invented the LongPen, a remote robotic writing technology that allows her to remotely write in ink from anywhere via the internet. She now lives in Toronto, Ontario, with

“But then what happens, but then what happens? I know I lost time. There must have been needles, pills, something like that. I couldn't have lost that much time without help. You have had a shock, they said. I would come up through a roaring and confusion, like surf boiling. I can remember feeling quite calm. I can remember screaming, it felt like screaming though it may have been only a whisper, Where is she? What have you done with her? There was no night or day; only a flickering. After a while there were chairs again, and a bed, and after that a window. She's in good hands, they said. With people who are fit. You are unfit, but you want the best for her. Don't you?” (Chapter 7) - This text shows when Offred was drugged and taken away of her daughter. The text gives a stressful feeling and shows how disheartening the Republic of Gilead was with drugging Offred (to a point where she cannot remember certain events) and taking away her daughter. It also shows how they categorized her as being unfit to keep care of her daughter, as she was given to a more fit family - as so she tries to believe. The scene itself could’ve never happened since Offred can’t truly